“Let her go,” said Debbie Pugh O’Neil, Kate’s sister, again. She was the hard-liner among them.
“That is easy for you to say,” William told her. “It is not your family that we’re talking about.”
“Of course it’s my family. But I will not allow…this to destroy us. She made her choice and that’s—”
“What about Suzanne? Are you saying that it was her choice too?”
“It was not her choice to be what she is. It is her choice to refrain from sinning. It is God’s test.”
William had heard it all before.
“And she has failed His test,” he said. “And we are to just abandon her. What about Kate? She is no sinner. She is doing what we are supposed to be doing. Tending to her daughter. What I am supposed to be doing.”
“And now she is a bigamist,” Kate’s mother said about her daughter.
“Please, mother. We are not going through this again,” Debbie said. “All we can do is pray for them and be welcoming to them when they come back.”
“What don’t you understand? They are not coming back. They are gone. I saw Suzanne and her…wife when they came for that wedding in Mill Valley. Edward saw her in New York. And Lizzie went to Suzanne’s wedding, for God’s sake. And now neither Lizzie nor Edward are welcome here.”
“Of course they are welcome,” Kate’s father said.
“No, they are not. Admit it. Suzanne is happy. She is happy, and now her mother is happy with another man. And they are happy.”
“But it is their choice. They have made it.” Devlin was protecting his sister from William’s onslaught.
Debbie said, “Don’t you get it, William? They are happy the way Eve was happy when she tasted the fruit. But they are destined to suffer for their quote-unquote happiness.”
Debbie was right. They had this conversation countless times. They rehashed the same ideas and they did it in part so they would reinforce each other’s faith. That, as Debbie said yet again, was all they could do, pray and be ready when the prodigals returned.
That day, though, William understood the absurdity of it all. Kate’s marriage did that. He was not to the place that Kate reached, of rejecting the belief that her God could be so cruel to her child, which caused her to leave the Church. William once thought God was testing him, tempting him to cast aside his faith in favor of his blood and he once was proud that unlike his wife he did not do so.
But he was a man and he was a father and he was a husband. And he was miserable in all three capacities. He might have killed himself except for it being a sin, which would be ironic because he would have killed himself because he refused to commit a much less grave one, of loving his child. Such were the depths of his despair.
As he drove south late that afternoon, he was concerned that flights, even domestic flights, might be canceled because of coronavirus. If that happened, he feared that he would not do what he knew he had to do.
His trip was spontaneous and probably inevitable. When he was through the door of the house in Mill Valley, he went to his computer and found a red-eye flight from San Francisco. It left at midnight and got into New York at about 8:30 the next morning. As far as he could tell, the flight was going. It was nearly empty, and he booked a seat in first class and drove to the airport.
On the plane, he declined offers of alcohol and quickly fell asleep. Only when the plane was on its final approach to JFK did he wake.